Sometimes, we don’t want to hear the answer, so we look for an easier fix. Such was the case recently with this email from Arjun:
Hello there Terry ! To begin with,I’ve to say I’m incredibly impressed for the way you recommend applications,settings,software reviews.Recently I ran into a problem,my hard drive LED was glowing solid and all the applications I tried to open up used to show up after ages for which I contacted my laptop manufacturer,HP.
They advised me to get into BIOS and run primary hard disk self test where I encountered an error #1-07,my manufacture’s tech. support advised to contact service centre and have my hard drive replaced.
I googled about this error and one of solutions I found was to run CHKDSK and I had it run and it fixed up the errors,found.
Matter of fact,after then my laptop started working the way it used to be,all the applications are showing up at jet speed. I just wanted to make sure, everything is fine and I happened to encounter the same error “#1-07 Fail” again.
Not to mention,my laptop is working very fine the way it should be.
I’d like to know what’s that error mean? Kindly enlighten me on this. Thanks in advance.
My Laptop Config: Manufacturer:HP Hard drive:FUJITSU MHV2120BH PL ATA device OS: MS Vista Home premium. RAM: 2GB Processor:Intel core 2 T5200 @1.60GHz I wish TCT to achieve greater miles ahead. Best Regards,
Arjun
I wrote back to Arjun to try to set him straight on the problem.
First, a semi-answer on his error code. It’s an HP internal (proprietary) error message, not a standard error code (e.g., a known error code from Windows). Therefore, I can’t so I can’t give him a clean answer.
Many manufacturers and software programmers use code structures similar to his #1-07. The 1 typically means a general type of error or a section of the program in which the error occurs. The 07 identifies the specific error that the manufacturer ‘s or programmer’s test was designed to identify.
My recommendation is that, if HP wants to replace the hard drive or recommends that it be replaced, he should replace it.
While CHKDSK seems to have "fixed" the symptoms, it has not fixed the problem(s) that created the symptoms. The problem is that the hard drive is failing.
When it starts failing, unless it is a catastrophic failure (for example, it worked yesterday but won’t power on today), a hard drive starts failing mechanically or electronically — and starts corrupting the file structure and/or data on the hard drive.
Arjun’s drive started corrupting the file storage structure. Checkdsk is smart enough to repair it to make it work — but not always smart enough to put all the pieces of a file back together.
My ultimate question to Arjun was: "Are you willing to risk corruption and loss of your data or a catastrphic disk failure?"
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